Been using pale moon for a few months now and quite happy with it.I have done a search of the forum and cannot find anything in relation to data collection.
Does pale moon collect data in a google fashion and sell it off to ad barons of any form.?..Forum search does not breed any results on this.

Also is pale moon subject to any judicial or government requests in regard to the handing over of data to them.

Nah dood. Ahem... No, absolutely not, we do not collect any kind of personally identifiable information. There is no telemetry or browsing habits.

I am gonna diverged from my normal more professional form to respond to specific points in the browser that may make some sort of request to us and what we can do..

Request to the Application Update Service and the blocklist.. "Oh x number of people accessed this file in y time span.. Neat."

Requests to the Sync Server.. "We have x number of sync users.. Best do the server upkeep!"

Requests to the Automatic Update Service on the Add-ons Site.. "I can't be bothered to log this.. Don't log this.. Oh? We need to send to Mozilla's Add-ons site? Well, send the extension GUID and tell them we are Firefox 24.9.. They don't need to know anything else.."

So, there you have it.. The full extent of our data gathering.. Which is .. No data gathering except maybe hits on a specific url which we almost never care about.

Absolutely not. We only collect data required for normal operational procedures and for server administration. At most we occasionally collect some aggregate statistics to find out if our server capacity is still sufficient to serve the number of users.

Moonraker wrote:and sell it off to ad barons of any form.?

No, we don't. They wouldn't be interested in what little operational logging we have anyway
Also, that would be against my principles.

Moonraker wrote:Also is pale moon subject to any judicial or government requests in regard to the handing over of data to them.

A fair question. The answer is that data that might be useful in a criminal investigation will be handed over if subpoenaed, and then only the relevant data for the investigation (no confiscating of entire logs or databases). Governmental requests without legal backing for a specific criminal case will not be honored, only legal ones and only when required by law.

"There will be times when the position you advocate, no matter how well framed and supported, will not be accepted by the public simply because you are who you are." -- Merrill Rose

So, as you dont collect any data that is useful to government entities, what if some similar entity approaches you for things like:

- Hey will you deliver a tampered executable to users identifiable by criteria xyz,...
- Hey will you include a non obvious backdoor in your open sourcecode that just looks like a coding oversight,...

...or else we'll make your life miserable, as we already know what things and people you value the most.

So the worst case evil entity case.

I guess that wont happen at this stage because the userbase isn't big enough to risk something like that. But if Palemoon ever gets to the popularity of Firefox in like 2010, something like this could happen.

Do you have any plans in that regard. Or rather what would be your natural reaction?

Did you talk about my comment just now? That is meant purely hypothetical, because Palemoon is actually the only browser where one could actually ask this and get a definite answer.

Palemoon is to me the most sane and uncorrupted browser that exists in my opinion.
You can talk to the devs, it doesnt collect unnecessary data, no opaque -keep end users away from serious talk- wall, friendly and precise people, no intrusive featurecreep, a stable browser that is just a browser.

Lord_Brezel wrote:So, as you dont collect any data that is useful to government entities, what if some similar entity approaches you for things like:

- Hey will you deliver a tampered executable to users identifiable by criteria xyz,...
- Hey will you include a non obvious backdoor in your open sourcecode that just looks like a coding oversight,...

...or else we'll make your life miserable, as we already know what things and people you value the most.

So the worst case evil entity case.

I guess that wont happen at this stage because the userbase isn't big enough to risk something like that. But if Palemoon ever gets to the popularity of Firefox in like 2010, something like this could happen.

Do you have any plans in that regard. Or rather what would be your natural reaction?

It would be preferable, in my opinion, to destroy Pale Moon rather than have it be used for such a purpose. My educated guess is Moonchild would agree with that.

The whole blow it up rather than have it fall into the hands of or serve evil thing. If you want to go with that viewpoint.

Try me
I'm a security expert; that also means I'm exceedingly good at getting back at people who try to twist my arm, and at distilling concrete information about anyone who tries to make my life miserable, and using that.

If they somehow do get leverage over me in that hypothetical situation, I'll toss the project out to the public and the community to continue where I cannot, including all documentation and explanations of how the project was undermined, and by whom. I'll blow everything fully public and make the responsible party more miserable than I would ever be. No "go quietly into the night" after taking my life's work away.

"There will be times when the position you advocate, no matter how well framed and supported, will not be accepted by the public simply because you are who you are." -- Merrill Rose

Moonchild wrote:
I'm a security expert; that also means I'm exceedingly good at getting back at people who try to twist my arm, and at distilling concrete information about anyone who tries to make my life miserable, and using that.

If they somehow do get leverage over me in that hypothetical situation, I'll toss the project out to the public and the community to continue where I cannot, including all documentation and explanations of how the project was undermined, and by whom. I'll blow everything fully public and make the responsible party more miserable than I would ever be. No "go quietly into the night" after taking my life's work away.

This is why I'm so happy to have found Pale Moon. Keep up the good work, MC!

Try me
I'm a security expert; that also means I'm exceedingly good at getting back at people who try to twist my arm, and at distilling concrete information about anyone who tries to make my life miserable, and using that.

If they somehow do get leverage over me in that hypothetical situation, I'll toss the project out to the public and the community to continue where I cannot, including all documentation and explanations of how the project was undermined, and by whom. I'll blow everything fully public and make the responsible party more miserable than I would ever be. No "go quietly into the night" after taking my life's work away.

In all honesty what made me use pale moon was you moonchild yourself.I was if you like a forum lurker for want of another word and from your posts i could clearly see you are a person of high intellect and experience who actually knows what the hell they are talking about.

If i can be bold,why have you never seeked employment from the large corporations etc.?Im sure you have your personal reasons which you understandably may not wish to divulge,
Anyway many thanks for your endeavour with pale moon.

Bumping this after seeing the link in gi_jimbo's sig. Excellent info from Moonchild & Tobin.

I can personally confirm that PM doesn't do any secretive data collection. I've left it idle for long periods of time with both uBO and Wireshark logging. Not a single bit of traffic with all auto-update options disabled.

Chrome is different story. I don't think it's nefarious, but it phones home a bit even with all settable options disabled, at least the ones in the menus. (I don't use it often enough to ever investigate it in great detail.)

Moonraker wrote:Also is pale moon subject to any judicial or government requests in regard to the handing over of data to them.

A fair question. The answer is that data that might be useful in a criminal investigation will be handed over if subpoenaed, and then only the relevant data for the investigation (no confiscating of entire logs or databases). Governmental requests without legal backing for a specific criminal case will not be honored, only legal ones and only when required by law.

"Law"?
You refer to an uncircumventable FORCE OF LIFE AND NATURE?Moderator note: further content of this post removed for being too inflammatory and against forum rules as regards post content.

This discussion reminds me of Truecrypt and Lavabit E-mail. Truecrypt died for a reason and Lavabit was forced to go dark. When you have a government with a virtual limitless amount of money to come after you, you are a little SOL. But leaving it in the public domain is a great thing and that's quite frankly a big F U! in their pathetic face. As evident with Veracrypt now. I'd like to use Veracrypt, but TC was already code checked and I'm happy with the conclusions. Yes, there are vulnerabilities, but that only applies when the computer is on. ANY! computer left on is vulnerable! So it's a moot point.

Anyway... I highly doubt some government trash will want MoonChild to add a back door or some crap. I bet they don't need it. Now I bet, just bet, if PaleMoon had a built in Telegram interface... you bet the Feds will want a back door.